Literature The light and dark sides of Max Frisch's Matura essay
In 1954, Max Frisch's Matura essay disappeared from the Rämibühl grammar school; two years ago it reappeared and is now being published for the first time. Not in the feuilleton, but in the 175th anniversary publication of Lehrmittelverlag Zurich.
27.02.2026, 06:30
27.02.2026, 06:31
SDA
To his knowledge, this essay has neither been missing nor searched for, reveals the President of the Max Frisch Foundation, Thomas Strässle, in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. "The certificates are archived, but nobody had this essay on their radar."
Rescued through theft
It can be assumed that it would be lost today had it not been stolen by a student named Hans Eggenberger in 1954. At least there are no other Matura essays from 1930 archived in the canton of Zurich. For Strässle, the discovery of the Matura essay by Max Frisch (1911-1991) is a "small literary-historical sensation: the essay from September 1930, written at the age of 19, is probably the oldest surviving manuscript by Max Frisch".
In 1954, Hans Eggenberger had this essay taken from the Rämibühl and then handed it over to the Max Frisch Foundation in 2024. In the book published by Lehrmittel Verlag Zürich (LMVZ) to mark the anniversary, Eggenberger recalls "How I became the thief and keeper of a Max Frisch manuscript". In short: thanks to an "Ämtli", the then high school student had a key to the room where, among other things, the Matura essays were kept and where his predecessors had already helped themselves. Eggenberger speculates that they were particularly interested in the essays of their fathers and teachers.
When "Stiller" was published in 1954, the music teacher at the time read from it enthusiastically. However, the German teacher did not want to read the novel with the class. Eggenberger was curious: "Max Frisch had once been a pupil at the Realgymnasium at Rämistrasse 59. I searched through the thinning pages of his Matura essays in German and found Frisch's essay from 1930: 'The light and dark sides of modern technology'. Obviously, until 1954, Max Frisch had not yet been a well-known Zurich author for my predecessors at the book agency," says Eggenberger in the second foreword to the essay.
Early literary ambitions
Frisch made his breakthrough during these years: the premiere of "Graf Öderland" (1951) at the Schauspielhaus Zurich was still a failure with audiences and critics, followed by the comedy "Don Juan oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie" (1953) and finally the novel "Stiller".
However, he already had literary ambitions as a grammar school pupil. Strässle refers to a play entitled "Stahl", which the 16-year-old Frisch sent to the Deutsches Theater Berlin and was then encouraged to submit later works. Three years later, he introduced his Matura essay with the following sentence: "If I were an authority, if my name already had the sound that makes people sit up and take notice, if my words had the suggestive power of a personality taken seriously, I would allow myself to condense the history of mankind into a handful of sentences, embedding birth and infancy and the dictatorship of technology in grotesque brevity."
The arrogance and supposed omniscience suggested here is probably still a feature of Matura essays today. The 19-year-old Max Frisch then does exactly what he announces by contrasting his contemporaries with a technology-less primitive man who has no time to think and is therefore happy. His entire argument against technology hinges on this thesis.
Only the grade 4-5
In the anniversary edition of the LMVZ, four graduates from today's Rämibühl rightly criticize the fact that Frisch does not or cannot provide any evidence that cavemen were actually happy. In addition, the essay is subjective and only focuses on the disadvantages. Perhaps this explains the score of 4-5, as only a few comma corrections were marked. Without knowing for sure who wrote the essay, the four agree that this text reveals the basic traits of a person "who knows what she thinks, who can write well and enjoys doing so".
In 1930, Frisch wrote the following about the present: "We have educational problems, economic problems, marital problems, scientific problems, sexual problems." What surprises literary scholar Strässle most about the essay is the topic: "The question of the benefits and disadvantages of technology is original in the context of contemporary history, as the major debates critical of technology actually only emerged later, after the end of the Second World War." It is no longer possible to reconstruct whether the question was posed by Frisch, or more likely by his German teacher.
Thomas Strässle did not want to place this essay by the 19-year-old Max Frisch "on the cover of the feuilleton", he emphasizes in conversation. After handing it over to the foundation, "quite complicated clarifications followed as to who could have which claims to this document". In consultation with all those involved, the Max Frisch Foundation decided to include the text in the LMVZ's anniversary publication. "This returns the essay to the place where it belongs. The Lehrmittelverlag belongs to the Canton of Zurich and is the right place for this text, which will thus remain available for a longer period of time and go into the libraries. "*
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
